Legal Commentary

Polling, Politics And Policy

By Big Tent Democrat

DemfromCt celebrates this CNN poll finding:

According to the poll, opposition to increased offshore drilling has grown 10 points since May and is now twice as high as it was in 2008. Fifty-eight percent of those questioned support a six-month moratorium on new drilling in the Gulf and other offshore sites; 68 percent favor increased regulation of the oil industry in this country.

DemfromCt appears to want to attribute this result to President Obama's speech:

Remember, the pundits opining on how Obama's speech sucked are the same people that explained to us how McCain won the debates.

I did not watch President Obama's speech and I know it was universally panned (by both Left and Right) stylistically. I thought the Left critique was interesting in that it raises a point that DemfromCt ignores - the President apparently did not argue for specific action, legislative or otherwise, in his speech.

Herein lies a problem with the Obama political strategy from the beginning of his Administration - very little political effort has been used to forward specific policies. The disconnect from the policy and the politics (and the polling) has clearly been, at least for me, the biggest flaw in the Obama Administration approach.

"Doing something" or being perceived as "doing something" is not the winning POLITICAL approach to governance. Doing something THAT WORKS is the key.

Now I am not at all familiar with the actual policy issues surrounding the Gulf spill issue, but I followed closely the economic stimulus issue of early 2009 and knew that the measure was simply inadequate (albeit better than nothing). Today we know that is true and we also know that the Obama Administration is between a rock and a hard place because they decided to play "deficit hawks" at the beginning of the year. Now, belatedly, the President and his team are making noises about more stimulus.

Too little, too late. Too much following the polls instead of working for policies that would lead to improvement in the polls.

And yes of course, things would be much worse with Republicans in charge, but that has nothing to do with evaluating what the Obama Administration has done, which on economic policy, has been mediocre at best. Both in terms of policy and politics.

Speaking for me only

Full post as published by TalkLeft on June 19, 2010 (boomark / email).